In a Long Term Evolution (LTE) system, a minimum time interval at which a base station uses one piece of scheduling signaling to schedule user equipment is one subframe, and scheduling information of only one subframe can be scheduled by using one piece of scheduling signaling. In a subsequent LTE system of an evolved release, scheduling information of multiple subframes can be scheduled by using one piece of scheduling signaling. In a scheduling signaling transfer process, UE feeds back, for new transmission scheduling, a hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) receiving status that corresponds to the new transmission scheduling. That is, when receiving is correct, the UE feeds back an acknowledgement (ACK) character, and when receiving is incorrect, the UE feeds back a negative acknowledgement (NACK) character. A base station sequentially determines an idle HARQ process according to a HARQ process number (HPN) and the HARQ receiving status fed back by the user equipment, generates an HPN according to the HARQ process, and then adds the HPN to scheduling signaling and sends the scheduling signaling to the user equipment. After receiving the scheduling signaling, the UE sequentially determines an idle HARQ process of the user equipment according to the HPN in the scheduling signaling, and correspondingly receives channel data scheduled by using the scheduling signaling. In a process of implementing transmission of the multi-subframe scheduling signaling, when scheduling information is incorrectly transmitted, if the base station uses single-subframe scheduling signaling to transmit retransmission scheduling information, as a result, a subframe scheduled by using single-subframe scheduling signaling may overlap with a subframe scheduled by using the multi-subframe scheduling signaling, thereby resulting in misunderstanding by the user equipment. In addition, when the user equipment misses detection of a retransmission scheduling subframe, the user equipment receives a current subframe according to the multi-subframe scheduling signaling, thereby resulting in incorrect transmission of data to be newly transmitted.
To avoid misunderstanding by user equipment and incorrect transmission of data to be newly transmitted, a solution in the prior art is: determining multiple HARQ processes according to a correspondence between process numbers of multiple HARQ processes and HARQ process fields, and generating scheduling signaling according to the correspondence between the process numbers of the multiple HARQ processes and the HARQ process fields, and according to the multiple HARQ processes. However, each subframe needs to have a process number, a maximum of eight HARQ processes can be supported by single-subframe scheduling signaling in a current frequency division duplex (FDD) system, and a maximum of 16 HARQ processes can be supported by single-subframe scheduling signaling in a current time division duplex (TDD) system. Therefore, a quantity of HARQ processes that can be supported is limited, and there is a problem of insufficient processes.